How do we make decisions as consumers? What do we pay attention to, and how do our initial responses predict our final choices? To what extent are these processes unconscious and cannot be reflected in overt reports? This course will provide you with an introduction to some of the most basic methods in the emerging fields of consumer neuroscience and neuromarketing. You will learn about the methods employed and what they mean. You will learn about the basic brain mechanisms in consumer choice, and how to stay updated on these topics. The course will give an overview of the current and future uses of neuroscience in business.

From the lesson

What is Neuromarketing all About?

We first need to define the field – what are the key concepts, what are the key methods and reasons for employing neuroscience to study consumers and communication effects? In this module, we will introduce the topic and how some specific studies provide key insights into what neuroscience has to offer in relationship with more traditional methods.

Meet the Instructors

Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy

PhD in Neurobiology, Certified Neuropsychologist & Assistant Professor in Marketing & NeuroscienceHead of the Center for Decision Neuroscience, Department of Marketing at Copenhagen Business School, and Head of Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance at Copenhagen University Hospital Hvidovre

Back here at my office at the Copenhagen Business School, and

here I'm sitting with one of the model brains I had here at my office.

so, as you can see the brain is, this is an approximate size of the brain.

The brain is something like one and

a half kilograms heavy, and it has approximately this size here.

Of course, there's no colors on, on the brain as we see here.

The, the brain typically has a color like a mushroom, something like that.

What we can see here are different bulges and hills.

And it's, you know,

from the outside of the brain, typically looks quite messy, in a way.

What we see are the hills here for example, is what we call a gyrus.

And the plural name for that is gyrii.

We also see some valleys.

The ridges down here, we call them, sulcii.

So one sulcus and several sulcii.

And there are some deep sulcii.

Well, we, other, otherwise haven't been calling sulcii, that we, so deep and

going so much through, that we call them fissures, like, like the one over here.

Now, if we look at the brain here, it has a color system.

Normally, this, over here, would be the eyes, and the nose down here.

You have the spinal cord coming this way, down to the body.

We also can see what's called the cerebellum, a small part of the brain,

relatively speaking, which is engaged in motor control.

But we also notice it's involved in emotional responses and

cognitive functions.

But the function of the cerebellum is actually pulling on the sternum.

If we then look at different parts of the brain, and

we grossly divide the brain into four different regions here.

And, we can look at the green part of the brain here, is what we

call the occipital lobe which is highly engaged when we, we, we have visual input.

We have the yellow region here, is the temporal lobe.

Which we know is involved in many things such as object recognition, object memory.

Episodic memory, even hearing and language is in, engaged in this, in this region.

We have the ble, blue part of the brain here is the parietal lobe.

We know that part of the brain is engaged whenever we have,

are self aware for example.

It's engaged in spatial movement and

also in the dorsal stream function, as we talked about earlier.

When we are looking at different, functions that are related to actions,

so to speak.

And then finally, the frontal part of the brain, the frontal lobe and

even the prefrontal cortex is involved in many different functions such

as working memory, preference, decision making, motor behavior, and so forth.

If you take a different look at the brain here from this side,

we can see that there's a strip here in red and a blue strip here.

And they belong to respectively, the frontal part of the brain and

the parietal part of the brain.

The parietal part is, has a nice, this is kind of a sensory strip.

It has a nice representation of the body.

So, this part of the brain, here,

has a nice representation of the right side of the body.

So whenever you feel something, you have a stimulation on your hand, for example.

There might be some extra activation up here.

If you then see that activation move up towards the, the shoulder,

you actually see activation move up here towards this region over here.

And then in a very similar way you also have a very nice mapping of

the motor region, so this means that to now stimulate this part of the brain we,

we cause an activation in this part of the brain, the person might have a kind of,

a jump in his or her right hand.

So this has kind of a nice distribution and mapping of,

of your body, both in terms of the senses, but also in terms of your motor behavior.

In terms of consumer behavior, when we are looking at different functions

that the brain's brain is doing while it's computing values, for

example, or paying attention to something.

We can see that different regions are important.

For example, when it comes to visual attention, the parts of the back of

the brain here, the occipital lobe, is really important for visual attention.

And so it could be visual saliency, it could be top down modulation of,

you know, when people are motivated to look for something.

This can change the activation of the occipital cortex.

When people recognize objects, and products and

even brands, we see a stronger activation of the bottom side here.

We can actually take the cerebellum out.

The bottom side of the temporal lobe is becoming more and more engaged.

And we have a nice distribution of different function here that some regions

here are thought to have a module that is dedicated to recognize faces, for example.

If we then look at our ability to hold onto information for just a few seconds.

This engages particularly the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on to the sides here.

And this is what we call working memory.

But it also is related to a measure of cognitive load.

So the harder you work on solving a puzzle and

keeping information in your mind at any one time.

The stronger activation we find in these parts of the brain up here.

And then we can look at actually the inside of the brain.

We can see that the yellow part here is the anterior singular cortex,

on the medial site here.

We see the spinal cord coming up.

This is the pons the midbrain.

Then move on to the basal ganglia and the thalamus.

If we look at the other side here, we can see that the,

all these cortices, the occipital lobe goes into the medial side.

The parietal cortex goes into the medial side.

And also see the frontal part is also going into the medial side.

This is the orbital, orbitofrontal cortex.

The orbitofrontal cortex goes all the way here.

This means that this is the medial towards the middle, of the orbitofrontal cortex,

and this is the lateral towards the side orbitofrontal cortex.

This small strip over here, as you can also see on this side in blue,

and in yellow, this is what we call the olfactory bulb.

This is an area that receives signals from the nose directly, and

causes you to, to be able to smell, for example.

So if we now lift off this part here,

and look into this area over here, what you can see here is the insula,

which is kind of an oblong structure going on the inside.

So it's kind of an insular part of the brain as you can see.

Now if we want to look at the part of the brain that is involved in memory and

in emotion, you can see the brain from the side again here.

What we can do is to lift off this part of the brain.

We can take out this insular part of the brain.

This is the hippocampus.

And on top of the hippocampus, you would normally see the amygdala on top of here.